Tuesday, May 8, 2012

The man who brought you Too Big To Fail has had just about enough of everybody blaming him for big banks failing.

In an interview with Fortune's Nin-Hai Tseng,
Sandy Weill, the former CEO of Citigroup, said his lumbering beast of a
bank, and other lumbering beasts like it, aren't to blame for the
crisis.
Weill was the CEO of Citigroup until late 2003, during the key
"becoming a monstrous disaster waiting to happen" phase of its
existence. He lobbied, tirelessly and successfully, to break down
Depression-era regulations against banks becoming too big. He even has a
plaque in his office that boasts "The Shatterer of Glass-Steagall," according to a New York Times report.

And after (or, really, before) those regulatory shackles were cast
aside, Weill worked tirelessly and successfully to bolt as many moving
parts onto Citigroup as he could. Every other bank followed suit, just
to keep up. Citi was king of them all for a while, the biggest bank in
the world, and Weill rode off into the sunset in 2006, when he retired
as chairman, his handiwork complete.

And then the wheels started to come off. About a year and a half
after his departure as chairman, Citi announced horrific losses due to
its exposure to subprime mortgages, and a year after that the government
pumped $45 billion into the bank to keep it from creating a black hole
into which all of our money would be sucked. Citi has ever since been
shedding as many of the parts Sandy Weill bolted on as it can....MORE